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Showing posts with the label Wendell Berry

The Peace of Wild Things

by Wendell Berry When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

An Elegy

by Wendell Berry I stand at the cistern in front of the old barn in the darkness, in the dead of winter, night strangely warm, the wind blowing, rattling an unlatched door. I draw the cold water up out of the ground, and drink. At the house the light is still waiting. An old man I've loved all my life is dying in his bed there. He is going slowly down from himself. In final obedience to his life, he follows his body out of our knowing. his hands, quiet on the sheet, keep a painful resemblance to what they no longer are.